February 03, 2007	Saturday	Muharram 14, 1428

PARIS: France’s love affair with Segolene Royal has cooled markedly since the start of 2007 and she needs to act fast if she wants to woo back voters who are now dating her arch rival Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 2006, Royal couldn’t put a foot wrong as she outwitted more experienced opponents to become the Socialist Party’s official candidate for the April, May presidential election.

But since the start of the year, nothing is going according to plan, with a series of gaffes and internal party disputes allowing the rightist Sarkozy to shoot past her in the polls.

“The magic is wearing off. The issue in the coming days will be to see if she can rediscover that magic. She might, but it’s not at all certain,” said Gerard Grunberg, a political analyst and deputy director of the prestigious Sciences Po university.

Alarm is spreading through the ranks of the Socialist Party, which, after 12 years of rule by conservative president Jacques Chirac, was confident that the youthful, iconoclastic Royal would lead it out of the political wilderness.

Party veterans admit her campaign is struggling and have urged Royal to lead a concerted counter attack on Sarkozy, who has managed to draw almost all the traditionally divided right to his flag and is dictating the terms of the electoral debate.

“We made some errors by perhaps not being present enough or reactive enough,” Jean-Louis Bianco, one of the heads of her campaign, told French television this week, adding: “There is a backwards move, that’s clear, but we are not sinking.”

Opinion polls this week suggested Sarkozy would win up to 54 per cent of the vote in the expected second round run off against Royal, with surveys suggesting that her support was sliding amongst key constituencies – such as the working classes.

“It isn’t impossible for her to bounce back, but there are clearly worrying signals for her,” said Jerome Sainte-Marie, the head of BVA pollsters. “People don’t think she is in the fight.”While acknowledging the problems, Royal’s camp says she is running an innovative campaign that will eventually pay off.

The Socialist candidate has organised some 5,000 so-called “participatory debates” across France to give ordinary people a chance to say what should go in her manifesto.

This process has allowed Royal to evade many questions about her policy platform in recent weeks, infuriating friend and foe alike, but she has promised to unveil the main guidelines of her programme based on the regional debates on Feb 11.

“It is double or quits. If her programme is a letdown, she will be diminished,” said Grunberg.

Royal’s problems have been mainly self-inflicted.

Trips to the Middle East and China exposed her inexperience on the international stage, and slip ups in interviews – such as not knowing how many nuclear submarines France had – suggested she simply might not be ready for the presidency.

She is now cancelling media interviews, suggesting she needs to do more homework and can’t afford any more blunders.—Reuters